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9 Responses to “If your bank account is withdrawn by an identity thief, is the bank responsible?”

By law, if you notify the bank of a fraudulent transaction within the required time frames, the bank is supposed to refund your money. But, they will complete an investigation to determine if your claim of identity theft is valid, and you will need to sign a fraud affidavit.

The time limits for reporting the fraudulent transactions depend on how you were compromised. If it was due to check fraud, then you typically have only thirty days from the date the statement was mailed on which the fraudulent transaction occurred. If it was due to an electronic transaction, such as a debit card compromise, you have 60 days.

There is a great deal of fraud that results from false reporting, so prepared to prove your case with the bank. A common practice is for criminals to approach account owners and ask them to give them, the criminals, the ATM card and PIN. The criminals withdraw the money and offer to share it with the account holder in exchange for having access to the ATM card and PIN. The banks are wise to this scam, so they don’t automatically refund the money.

It depends on the bank but all banks will do an investigation to determine if it was you that actually withdrew the money. Filing a police report to report the identity theft is an absolute necessity as that is the first thing the bank will ask about. It can take a long time to get this sort of thing straightened out but most people eventually get reimbursed by the bank.